I realize I kind of skimmed over the whole skirmish trait system in my last post. Here’s more detail.

You’ll talk to a Skirmish Captain to organize your traits. Here’s an empty trait panel — it’ll feel pretty familiar to any LOTRO player:

And here’s my “full” panel, tricked out for a healing companion:

You’ll see there are slots that I need to unlock as I advance, same as with normal traits.

The top trait row, Attribute, basically sets the ‘class’ for your soldier. Right now I have two choices, Warrior (essentially a Champion) which I got via the tutorial, and Herbalist (a healer) which I bought with Skirmish Marks. You put a Role Attribute trait in slot 1 of this row; I’m as yet unsure what goes into the other slots in this row. I couldn’t slot both Herbalist and Warrior. There are some cosmetic traits; maybe those go in the other slots? If you want your Companion to be a hobbit-lad, for instance, you can buy that feature with skirmish marks. Maybe someone can fill in the gaps here.

Here’re the pop-ups for the two Roles I currently have:
   

If you notice the red text at the bottom of the Warrior Role, it’s because I had the Herbalist Role slotted when I took the screen shot.

Next two rows are Skills and Training. I’m honestly not clear on what the difference between the two is. As a reward for completing the Skirmish Tutorial, I took “Herbalist Education” which gave me a bunch of herbalist traits; two each of Skills and Training. (Note I had to buy the Herbalist role in order to put these to use).

Skills:
   

Training:
   

The last row is for Personal traits which directly impact your character. I only have one of these to show off:

Changing skirmish traits costs silver, same as changing normal traits does.

And that’s as far as I’ve taken this. I was going to do some more experimenting but the Skirmish Join panel says I’ve exceeded the max number of skirmishes I can take part in this week!! I assume that’s a bug (since I only fought in 1 skirmish), but it does indicate that there are systems in place for preventing you from doing nothing but grinding skirmishes all day.

Obviously this is all new to me and I can’t say how I’ll feel about the system come springtime, but for now I’m pretty excited. Hopefully there’ll be lots of traits to unlock and/or purchase which will give the player many options for customizing exactly the kind of companion he or she will be taking into battle.